Political post:
One never knows if something said by the media has any truth. Even less can you trust anything said by a politician, let alone a politician on the eve of an election.
So the story linked to here may be just a fantasy. I hope so. The last evacuation brought Hamas to power (other reasons aside, the evacuation was clearly one of the main reasons - if the Arabs believed that violence was getting them nowhere, they might have been more reluctant to bring Hamas to power, despite the corruption of the PLO). So the new Kadima plan is to do more evacuations.
As a result of the last evacuation, my cousins were thrown out of their house and still have nowhere to live. One of the settlements listed for evacuation in the new plan is Tekoa, where I lived from 1992 until 1997.
There are a lot of nice people living there.
Many Israelis are having a very difficult time trying to figure out who to vote for. In the U.S., politicians are usually in the government for 8 or 12 years and then they're gone. Not in Israel. Here we have politicians in power for 40 years or more. Each vote is the same choice between the same people who are unqualified to solve our problems. If the government falls, we get to choose again between the same people. Nobody ever gets the message that we want new people to choose from.
We have no senate or house of representatives, just a majority rule in the Knesset. And that majority is ruled absolutely by the head of the party with majority power. There is no attempt to do what is best, only to do what they want how they want it. The same holds for left or right.
So the parties in the Knesset are almost irrelevant. Usually it is only who is prime minister that really counts.
Who is running?
Kadima:Ehud Olmert . This party is brand new and consists entirely of people who ran for posts in other parties, failed, and moved to the Kadima party because the polls seemed to show that they would have a better chance of getting into the Knesset. Wow. And this party is leading in the polls by a factor of 2 over any other party (38 seats or so, out of 120). It was founded by Ariel Sharon, who is now in a coma, which is roughly where he put the country, too. Ehud is hell-bent on repeating all of his mistakes.
Likud:Binyamin "Bibi" Netanyahu . Bibi proved himself incompetent as a prime minister already, although competent as foreign minister and finance minister - the latter depending upon whom you ask. He is a total autocrat. The saving grace is his party. All of the major scum left for Kadima, and the remainder were thrown out, leaving a fresh set of faces who are still uncorrupted (yet).
Labor:Amir Peretz . Amir was until very recently the head of the national union, one of the most corrupt and disastrous workers unions on the face of the earth. It has paralyzed the nation several times each year for fifty or more years, ensuring that people who have no competence remain in power and paid highly. Now he is running on a platform aimed at destroying the economy of Israel. The rest of the party still refuses to believe that the Arabs really, deep-down in their hearts, mean us any harm.
Meretz:Yossi Beilin . The radical left, whose idea of response to terrorists is to give up everything, then hold negotiations, and then plead for mercy.
The Arab parties . Who literally run on a platform of dissolving the state of Israel.
National Union/NRP:Benny Alon . Who run on the platform that all Arabs should be killed or thrown out of the country. While the NRP's platform is slightly better, they have proven themselves to be entirely ineffectual or corrupt whenever given any power.
Yisrael Beiteinu:Avigdor Lieberman . The Russian version of the radical right wing, with no plan except to give more money to the Russian immigrants.
Shas:Eli Yishai . Who believe that the budget of Israel should go to religious sephardi Jews, and everyone else can go to hell, especially the non-religious.
UTJ: Who believe that the budget of Israel should go to religious Ashkenazi Jews, and everyone else can go to hell, especially the non-religious.
That's about it. God save us.
Yehuda
Sunday, March 05, 2006
Saturday, March 04, 2006
Weekend Gaming
Dinner: We ate out at a friend's house. She had other guests including one named Rebbecca. Our mutual friend had been trying to put us together (as it turns out, we had met before) because Rebbecca also plays games with her family all the time. She had brought a little game to show me when she had heard that I was coming. It turned out to be the Norwegian version of Pass the Pigs.
Rebbecca and my friend both come from Norway near the Oslo region.
Lunch: Invited out again. When we got there, their child was putting away Wonders of the World Monopoly (a Hebrew translation of the English version). This was the same family whose mother had asked me to teach her the rules to Rat-a-Tat Cat, but them hopelessly forgot them again. Non-gamers; what can you do?
Afternoon: When I got home I found one of the single mom's over with her daughter in tow. I wrote about her previously. This time I remember her name: Dvira. Dvira talks about me to her mom and has wanted to come back and play again since her last visit. We were both happy to reacquaint. She is about 7 years old.
We played The Menorah Game with her mom before her mom went off with Rachel to Rachel's torah class. Then we played three games one on one, and two more after Tal came in and joined us. Dvira didn't win any, but she definitely got better after each game. After that I introduced her to Settlers of Catan. It was a great game, tightly contested. We were all sitting at about 6 or 7 points. I got Largest Army which brought me to 8 points, but then Dvira built a settlement and after a round or two stole Longest Road from Tal to clinch the victory. She was quite excited.
We may see her at the game night, although she can only stay until 8 o'clock.
The Set system: On the way over to lunch I was thinking about how to transform the Set game into a system of games using a pack of playing cards. I thought about a little math game that plays without the picture cards. The black cards are face value, the red cards are face value plus ten. Cards are slowly flipped over. The first player to call an equation that uses cards on the table gets them. Equations can be formed using at least one of +, -, *, /, and an =.
Some variants: You can add the jacks and play that when there is an even number of jacks on the table the black cards are plus ten and the red cards are regular. You can also play that players keep their pile face open, and the top card of each player's pile can also be used (and is taken by the player forming the equation).
Yehuda
Rebbecca and my friend both come from Norway near the Oslo region.
Lunch: Invited out again. When we got there, their child was putting away Wonders of the World Monopoly (a Hebrew translation of the English version). This was the same family whose mother had asked me to teach her the rules to Rat-a-Tat Cat, but them hopelessly forgot them again. Non-gamers; what can you do?
Afternoon: When I got home I found one of the single mom's over with her daughter in tow. I wrote about her previously. This time I remember her name: Dvira. Dvira talks about me to her mom and has wanted to come back and play again since her last visit. We were both happy to reacquaint. She is about 7 years old.
We played The Menorah Game with her mom before her mom went off with Rachel to Rachel's torah class. Then we played three games one on one, and two more after Tal came in and joined us. Dvira didn't win any, but she definitely got better after each game. After that I introduced her to Settlers of Catan. It was a great game, tightly contested. We were all sitting at about 6 or 7 points. I got Largest Army which brought me to 8 points, but then Dvira built a settlement and after a round or two stole Longest Road from Tal to clinch the victory. She was quite excited.
We may see her at the game night, although she can only stay until 8 o'clock.
The Set system: On the way over to lunch I was thinking about how to transform the Set game into a system of games using a pack of playing cards. I thought about a little math game that plays without the picture cards. The black cards are face value, the red cards are face value plus ten. Cards are slowly flipped over. The first player to call an equation that uses cards on the table gets them. Equations can be formed using at least one of +, -, *, /, and an =.
Some variants: You can add the jacks and play that when there is an even number of jacks on the table the black cards are plus ten and the red cards are regular. You can also play that players keep their pile face open, and the top card of each player's pile can also be used (and is taken by the player forming the equation).
Yehuda
Friday, March 03, 2006
Spit or Speed and Other Such Nonsense
My daughter Tal insists that she hasn't yet beat me at Spit, even though I remember her beating me the last time. So she still "has" to play me so that she can eventually beat me at it.
I know I'm slowing down, but I still managed to win again. Some day I will lose consistently and then I'll be an old dried up little man lying on the beach where bullies kick packs of cards into my face.
Tal has this to say about the two different versions of Spit/Speed she plays:
Name: Spit. She calls it Speed.
Versions:
I (Yehuda) learned the standard (?) American version with 5 piles of 1 to 5 cards, top one open. If you have duplicates, you can double up and open more cards, so long as you have no more than 5 piles at a time. Each player calls Spit and opens a card. Players try to put cards as fast as they can onto either of the middle piles. They can only place cards 1 up or 1 down from the top card of the pile. When the open card(s) on top of a pile are placed, the unopened one below is turned up.
Play is one handed. The other hand has to hold the deck. Cards go up or down and wrap around from King to Ace or vice versa. When one player is out, he or she takes whichever pile he or she wants. The player wants the smaller pile, but has to estimate by eyeballing; s/he can't count or feel the cards.
Tal and her friends play this version with the following changes: You can feed the piles after "Spit" with the other hand. First person to slap after one player goes out gets the pile they slap. If you have two or less cards to play, you can hold them in your hand.
Then there's Chinese Speed: 4 open piles of one card each in front of each player. Every time you play a card to a pile you open back up to 4 piles in front of you. When you finish your deck, you can pick up the cards you have left to play (or the players can decide on a number of cards at which you can pick up). If there are no cards left to Speed from either player, then you mix the piles separately, turn them upside down and open from them. First player to slap a pile gets it after one goes out.
Other card games she plays:
- A game of which she doesn't know the name: Each player lays down 4 cards upside down, looks at two and returns them face down. The point of the game is to have the lowest hand. 10 is worth 0. Ace is 1. J, Q, or K are losing cards unless they cancel out with your opponent. Each round you draw a card, look at it, and replace one of your own or discard it. You can't look at the card you replaced.
If you pull a J, you can swap a card with your opponent (unseen). If you pull a Q, you can look at one of your cards. If you pull a K, you can pull two more. When you feel like it, you can call "Stop" before taking your turn. No points; each game is separate.
- Another game she doesn't know the name, but plays just like "8 1/2": 4 cards face down. Pull 8 cards and put down 8's, 3's, 7's, and 10's, and then your highest cards until you have put 4 face up cards on your face down cards. You leave these piles until the game nears its end.
The player with the lowest card in their hand starts. Each player places a higher card (multiple of the same, if they have) onto the middle pile and picks back up to 4 cards. The Magic cards (3,7,8,10) can be put onto any cards and have special meanings: 8's are "invisible" which means that the next card still has to be higher than the previous card. 3's you can place along with any additional card. 10's burn the pile, which gets tossed out, and you go again. And with 7's, your opponent's next card must be lower. Once 4 cards of the same rank have all been played in a pile, the pile is burnt (discarded).
If you can't put, you have to pick up the pile into your hand. When all cards are gone from your hand and deck, you play cards from your face up pile. When they are gone, you play them randomly from your face down cards. First player out wins.
Not a strategy game.
I won't bother with the other games, because they contain no choices. To paraphrase Bill Cosby, this is called "having a good time".
Yehuda
I know I'm slowing down, but I still managed to win again. Some day I will lose consistently and then I'll be an old dried up little man lying on the beach where bullies kick packs of cards into my face.
Tal has this to say about the two different versions of Spit/Speed she plays:
Name: Spit. She calls it Speed.
Versions:
I (Yehuda) learned the standard (?) American version with 5 piles of 1 to 5 cards, top one open. If you have duplicates, you can double up and open more cards, so long as you have no more than 5 piles at a time. Each player calls Spit and opens a card. Players try to put cards as fast as they can onto either of the middle piles. They can only place cards 1 up or 1 down from the top card of the pile. When the open card(s) on top of a pile are placed, the unopened one below is turned up.
Play is one handed. The other hand has to hold the deck. Cards go up or down and wrap around from King to Ace or vice versa. When one player is out, he or she takes whichever pile he or she wants. The player wants the smaller pile, but has to estimate by eyeballing; s/he can't count or feel the cards.
Tal and her friends play this version with the following changes: You can feed the piles after "Spit" with the other hand. First person to slap after one player goes out gets the pile they slap. If you have two or less cards to play, you can hold them in your hand.
Then there's Chinese Speed: 4 open piles of one card each in front of each player. Every time you play a card to a pile you open back up to 4 piles in front of you. When you finish your deck, you can pick up the cards you have left to play (or the players can decide on a number of cards at which you can pick up). If there are no cards left to Speed from either player, then you mix the piles separately, turn them upside down and open from them. First player to slap a pile gets it after one goes out.
Other card games she plays:
- A game of which she doesn't know the name: Each player lays down 4 cards upside down, looks at two and returns them face down. The point of the game is to have the lowest hand. 10 is worth 0. Ace is 1. J, Q, or K are losing cards unless they cancel out with your opponent. Each round you draw a card, look at it, and replace one of your own or discard it. You can't look at the card you replaced.
If you pull a J, you can swap a card with your opponent (unseen). If you pull a Q, you can look at one of your cards. If you pull a K, you can pull two more. When you feel like it, you can call "Stop" before taking your turn. No points; each game is separate.
- Another game she doesn't know the name, but plays just like "8 1/2": 4 cards face down. Pull 8 cards and put down 8's, 3's, 7's, and 10's, and then your highest cards until you have put 4 face up cards on your face down cards. You leave these piles until the game nears its end.
The player with the lowest card in their hand starts. Each player places a higher card (multiple of the same, if they have) onto the middle pile and picks back up to 4 cards. The Magic cards (3,7,8,10) can be put onto any cards and have special meanings: 8's are "invisible" which means that the next card still has to be higher than the previous card. 3's you can place along with any additional card. 10's burn the pile, which gets tossed out, and you go again. And with 7's, your opponent's next card must be lower. Once 4 cards of the same rank have all been played in a pile, the pile is burnt (discarded).
If you can't put, you have to pick up the pile into your hand. When all cards are gone from your hand and deck, you play cards from your face up pile. When they are gone, you play them randomly from your face down cards. First player out wins.
Not a strategy game.
I won't bother with the other games, because they contain no choices. To paraphrase Bill Cosby, this is called "having a good time".
Yehuda
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Online World of Games
Having started a new RPG session, I found my way back into the online world of discussions about roleplaying. RPGs and CCGs are mainstream at this point. If you want to know what the board game world is going to look like when it becomes mainstream, take a look at what the RPG and CCG worlds are like right now.
The incredible amount of information and sites, as well as the massively low signal to noise ratio, doesn't bother me, but that is because I am an expert information searcher - I consider it one of my professional skills, after all. But I can see how it would bother other people.
On the topic of low SNR, after putting a link on the Monopoly post telling people to go to BGG to learn about other games, I decided to take a look at the new home page of BGG as if I was a new user. Not logged in, of course. I leave it to my esteemed readers to tell me whether they think the new home page to the site is of any value to potential new players.
Anyhoo.
I know that a lot of board gamers have difficulty separating the "environment" of RPGs from the games themselves, the same way that they can't separate the environment of CCGs from the CCG itself. Still, I can't help but feel that my esteemed readers are better than that, and won't mind if I occasionally link to some RPG or CCG material without thinking that I am "luring them into the dark side".
There was a great amount of wonderful stuff that I used to look at back in the nineties. For CCG's, who can forget the information from thedojo.com, mtgnews, the deck vortex, the card lists at Wizards of the Coast, and so on? For RPGs, there was the entire d20 system online (I was excited about that until I actually played it), ENWorld.org, and all those great Netbooks. And the RPG equivalent to the Misadventures in Gaming series: the woeful tales of a sick game group by Ab3 on the RPG.net forums (try "Rants and Reviews" on this site).
Today I found this funny post about violent girl gamers. Very amusing.
It reminds me of the night before my high school graduation. I still have no idea how I managed to accomplish this, but I rounded up four cute girls from my high school, as well as my two older brothers, and we all went for an all-night game of D&D out in SUNY Stony Brook.
I still don't know how I convinced them to come. They were friends, but they had never played D&D and we had graduation the next day. But they had a great time. They also gravitated towards playing the heavily weaponed fighting PCs. As the night became later and later, towards 2 or 3 am, they began to get sillier and sillier, acting drunk, hanging upside down off the couches, laughing at everything, and generally going wild. I wish I remembered more about exactly what happened, but I do remember that it was a great night, and very funny.
There is a wealth of great reading in the world of online games outside of the board game world. In fact, and this is a secret, there's a wealth of great reading material outside the game world altogether. And not just fantasy, sci-fi, and military!
Yehuda
The incredible amount of information and sites, as well as the massively low signal to noise ratio, doesn't bother me, but that is because I am an expert information searcher - I consider it one of my professional skills, after all. But I can see how it would bother other people.
On the topic of low SNR, after putting a link on the Monopoly post telling people to go to BGG to learn about other games, I decided to take a look at the new home page of BGG as if I was a new user. Not logged in, of course. I leave it to my esteemed readers to tell me whether they think the new home page to the site is of any value to potential new players.
Anyhoo.
I know that a lot of board gamers have difficulty separating the "environment" of RPGs from the games themselves, the same way that they can't separate the environment of CCGs from the CCG itself. Still, I can't help but feel that my esteemed readers are better than that, and won't mind if I occasionally link to some RPG or CCG material without thinking that I am "luring them into the dark side".
There was a great amount of wonderful stuff that I used to look at back in the nineties. For CCG's, who can forget the information from thedojo.com, mtgnews, the deck vortex, the card lists at Wizards of the Coast, and so on? For RPGs, there was the entire d20 system online (I was excited about that until I actually played it), ENWorld.org, and all those great Netbooks. And the RPG equivalent to the Misadventures in Gaming series: the woeful tales of a sick game group by Ab3 on the RPG.net forums (try "Rants and Reviews" on this site).
Today I found this funny post about violent girl gamers. Very amusing.
It reminds me of the night before my high school graduation. I still have no idea how I managed to accomplish this, but I rounded up four cute girls from my high school, as well as my two older brothers, and we all went for an all-night game of D&D out in SUNY Stony Brook.
I still don't know how I convinced them to come. They were friends, but they had never played D&D and we had graduation the next day. But they had a great time. They also gravitated towards playing the heavily weaponed fighting PCs. As the night became later and later, towards 2 or 3 am, they began to get sillier and sillier, acting drunk, hanging upside down off the couches, laughing at everything, and generally going wild. I wish I remembered more about exactly what happened, but I do remember that it was a great night, and very funny.
There is a wealth of great reading in the world of online games outside of the board game world. In fact, and this is a secret, there's a wealth of great reading material outside the game world altogether. And not just fantasy, sci-fi, and military!
Yehuda
Pasted on Theme to an Extreme
Today's Absurd Notion comic (#123) demonstrates the hazards of buying a game for its theme.
Yehuda
Yehuda
Session Report Up
Games played: Maneater x 2, Go, Power Grid, Prince of Florence, Santiago, Tigris and Euphrates, Railway Rivals.
Update: To find the session reports ...
If you click the heading of this post it takes you to the JSGC website: http://www.freewebs.com/jergames .
At the top of that page is a link to the session reports page: http://www.freewebs.com/jergames/reports.html .
That page links to all session reports. At the top of that page will be a link to the latest session report.
Yehuda
Update: To find the session reports ...
If you click the heading of this post it takes you to the JSGC website: http://www.freewebs.com/jergames .
At the top of that page is a link to the session reports page: http://www.freewebs.com/jergames/reports.html .
That page links to all session reports. At the top of that page will be a link to the latest session report.
Yehuda
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
I Hate Computers
Not the ones I work on ... well, actually I hate those, too.
Mostly it's the ones that have been put in the hands of the system and whose entire purpose is to make our lives more difficult.
Supermarket
I walked out of the supermarket today after waiting in line for ten minutes. The one "working" cashier was trying to scan through a customer who was trying to purchase a supermarket deal, while that customer went back and forth trying to prove that the item was supposed to scan as listed on the sign hanging near the product.
In Israel, to remove anything that was inadvertently scanned in, you have to run a card through the checkout machine, enter a key and an access codes, wait for the management to enter another access code, pull out a form on a clipboard, enter the information, sign it, have the customer sign it, and so on. The scanned item kept entering incorrectly, so it had to be repeatedly canceled.
I wasn't the only one who walked out.
This represents a failure on the part of the checkout person for repeatedly dealing with this one individual while a dozen were queued up, the management for allowing this to continue, the chain for insisting on these dumb practices, and so on.
But the main culprit is whoever insisted on installing this checkout computer. Whose benefit was this for? It certainly doesn't make things quicker or easier for the consumer. The percentage of incorrectly scanned items is far greater than the number of manually entered incorrect items at a local corner store. And at the local corner store, the checker can multi-process. If someone is holding up the line, other people can leave the $1 for their newspaper and walk out in the meantime.
it doesn't help the checker or the management. They have just as much work dealing with this computer and its errors as they would dealing with a manual machine.
It helps only the bigwigs in their ivory towers who treat their staff and customers like moving targets. Computers installed to nail down the masses. So that they can charge more money, make more profit, and sell their customer information.
Salary
My new salary is based on my working hours. Guess what tracks my hours at work?
I can work 1/4 hour less on one day and 1/4 hour more on another day and still get paid my full salary. However, I can't work 1/4 less one month and 1/4 more the next or previous month. If I do, I will get docked 1/4 hour salary.
I don't get paid overtime as a computer professional. That doesn't bother me. But to not pay me overtime one month and then charge me for undertime the next month sticks in my gut. And the time clock. Doesn't it make more sense, in a profession like mine, to pay me if I get my job done? I'm not working customer support, where I answer questions between 8 and 6. I'm doing in-house technical writing. I get a project, I do it. It doesn't matter how many hours it takes to do it so long as I get done all of my projects and work satisfactorily.
Do they even know what I'm doing during those hours at work? Or does it just matter that I'm here?
Computers. Brrr... Give me a board game to play with people and keep the computers away from me.
Yehuda
Mostly it's the ones that have been put in the hands of the system and whose entire purpose is to make our lives more difficult.
Supermarket
I walked out of the supermarket today after waiting in line for ten minutes. The one "working" cashier was trying to scan through a customer who was trying to purchase a supermarket deal, while that customer went back and forth trying to prove that the item was supposed to scan as listed on the sign hanging near the product.
In Israel, to remove anything that was inadvertently scanned in, you have to run a card through the checkout machine, enter a key and an access codes, wait for the management to enter another access code, pull out a form on a clipboard, enter the information, sign it, have the customer sign it, and so on. The scanned item kept entering incorrectly, so it had to be repeatedly canceled.
I wasn't the only one who walked out.
This represents a failure on the part of the checkout person for repeatedly dealing with this one individual while a dozen were queued up, the management for allowing this to continue, the chain for insisting on these dumb practices, and so on.
But the main culprit is whoever insisted on installing this checkout computer. Whose benefit was this for? It certainly doesn't make things quicker or easier for the consumer. The percentage of incorrectly scanned items is far greater than the number of manually entered incorrect items at a local corner store. And at the local corner store, the checker can multi-process. If someone is holding up the line, other people can leave the $1 for their newspaper and walk out in the meantime.
it doesn't help the checker or the management. They have just as much work dealing with this computer and its errors as they would dealing with a manual machine.
It helps only the bigwigs in their ivory towers who treat their staff and customers like moving targets. Computers installed to nail down the masses. So that they can charge more money, make more profit, and sell their customer information.
Salary
My new salary is based on my working hours. Guess what tracks my hours at work?
I can work 1/4 hour less on one day and 1/4 hour more on another day and still get paid my full salary. However, I can't work 1/4 less one month and 1/4 more the next or previous month. If I do, I will get docked 1/4 hour salary.
I don't get paid overtime as a computer professional. That doesn't bother me. But to not pay me overtime one month and then charge me for undertime the next month sticks in my gut. And the time clock. Doesn't it make more sense, in a profession like mine, to pay me if I get my job done? I'm not working customer support, where I answer questions between 8 and 6. I'm doing in-house technical writing. I get a project, I do it. It doesn't matter how many hours it takes to do it so long as I get done all of my projects and work satisfactorily.
Do they even know what I'm doing during those hours at work? Or does it just matter that I'm here?
Computers. Brrr... Give me a board game to play with people and keep the computers away from me.
Yehuda
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